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The dad scrolled through his daughter’s Instagram account, looking for clues. The most recent post was a photograph of an ice-cream cone, extravagantly large, held up against a white wall by a disembodied hand. Peppermint stick, or strawberry. The mound was starting to melt, a trickle of it inching down the cone and drawing dangerously close to the thumb. His daughter’s.

The next photo was a closeup of a shopwindow. Inside the window glowed a pink neon sign spelling out the word “warm” in lowercase letters. The glowing word took up most of the frame: it was impossible to tell what sort of store it was.

Another closeup: an eraser-colored rose, its petals halfway unfurled.

A panorama: the sky at sunset.

A shot of her dog, Bob, curled up like a cinnamon bun on the pleated, peachy expanse of her bed.

And then an earlobe—was that what it was? Soft, rounded, partly in shadow.

He closed his eyes and put down the phone.

His daughter was nearly twelve, and difficult to talk to.

•

Normally she rode the bus home from school, but, now that she had to do physical therapy twice a week, he had been picking her up and taking her to the appointments. He felt responsible. These problems with her joints—runner’s knee, Achilles tendinitis—were undoubtedly a handicap she’d inherited from his gouty side of the family. In ballet class, she could no longer do grand pliés or go up to relevé. In the middle of the night, she would wake up in pain. He kept a tin of Tiger Balm on her nightstand so that she could find it easily in the dark.

The physical therapist was a young woman dressed as an older one, in ironed slacks and support shoes. She had a secretive smile and a stiff demeanor. The dad didn’t always feel comfortable asking her questions, but his daughter seemed to like her. “Hi, Ivy,” the therapist would murmur as they entered the office, her little smile widening, and the two of them would disappear into the equipment. From the waiting room, the dad could hear the whirr of the stationary bicycle and the sound of their voices, his silent companion from the car suddenly talkative. It made a kind of music, the wheel spinning and her talking.

•

Correction: his daughter wasn’t entirely silent in the car. She sang along to songs on the radio, songs patchy with blanked-out words that she made a point of mouthing but didn’t say aloud. A billboard might prompt her to ask a question like “Why is she drinking out of a paper bag?” Sometimes, gazing at her phone, she would let out a low, triumphant hiss. Yesssss! She’d got every answer right on the Kylie Jenner quiz. Received seventy-four likes on her ice-cream photo. Set a new personal record on her Snapchat streak with Talia. Other days her phone lay inert in her lap. Only last week she had asked, eyes brimming and fixed on the dashboard, “Dad, can I be homeschooled?” Undone, he’d answered, “Sure.”

•

After physical therapy, in the elevator heading down to the parking lot he gave her a squeeze and said, “You’re quite the conversationalist in there.” His daughter looked at him with alarm. Of course it hadn’t come out the way he’d wanted it to. “I’m glad,” he tried again, “that there’s an adult you enjoy talking to.” Which was true, although it sounded as if he meant the opposite. Even to his own ears he sounded sorry for himself. But his daughter, good for her, was not thinking about him or his feelings. She stared at the elevator doors. “You’re making me feel like I talk too much!” she whispered furiously, deep in her own embarrassment.

•

New Instagram post: a peeled-off pair of ballet tights, splayed on the white tiles of a bathroom floor.

•

Some days his daughter’s quietness in the car felt blank and mysterious; but some days it felt excruciatingly full, like an inflamed internal organ about to burst. On one such afternoon the dad said carefully, “I’m not going to look at you. I’m not going to say anything. I’m just going to keep my eyes on the road. I’m going to keep driving, and, when you’re ready, you say whatever you want.” After a moment of silence, she said, “I’m considering it.” And then, “Can I curse?” He nodded. She asked, “You won’t make any noises, or have any expressions at all on your face?” He nodded again. They drove for several more minutes. The effort was killing him. Also the dread. He wasn’t sure if he had the capacity to receive whatever feeling it was that she was full of. When they were only three blocks from the therapist’s office, she said to the windshield, “I have no friends.” As he eased into the parking lot, she said, “And don’t tell me, ‘But you were just at Annie’s house last Friday.’ I know that’s what you’re going to say. But you can’t make me feel better. People only hang out with me because there’s nobody else around. I’m not their friend.” She opened the car door slowly. “I’m their second choice.” She heaved her backpack off the floor while he stayed behind the wheel, noticing his breath and absorbing the punch in various parts of his body. Why hadn’t she cursed?

•

New post: a hamburger with lettuce and Thousand Island dressing, cut in half, cooked medium rare.

•

The physical therapist recommended a series of exercises to do at home. Some, like the calf raises, were straightforward, but others had names such as Clam. Studying the printout, with its unhelpful black-and-white drawings, the dad asked, “You understand what all of this means?” Fire Hydrant. Dipping Bird. Short Bridge. Clock. His daughter didn’t glance up from her phone: “Uh-huh.” He stuck the paper to the refrigerator with a magnet. It looked somewhat quaint there. All her handouts from school were now distributed digitally, for environmental reasons. “You know you’re supposed to be doing these every night?” No answer. Marooned on one side of the island, he wondered, not for the first time, if open concept was such a great thing after all. Was she in the kitchen talking with him, or was she in the family room, on the sofa with her phone? Unclear. Without untying the laces, she scraped off her sneakers, toe to heel. Two consecutive thunks. “Your progress depends on it. You know that, right?” Elegantly, she lifted her long legs up and out of sight. “Ivy?” She sank beneath the horizon of the sofa. “Hello?”

•

Guess what: her only homework was to watch TV. This was what his daughter announced when he picked her up from ballet class. In a series of texts, he and his wife agreed that they would order ramen and watch the Presidential debate as a family, and though it took them a while to get settled—the restaurant had sent only one spicy instead of two, and when they sat down on the sofa Bob kept jumping into their laps and had to be crated—once they finally organized themselves, with their drinks and their bowls and their napkins and their chopsticks, it felt warm and momentous being there together in front of the television. Dorothy muttered encouragement at the moderator. “Keep at him,” she said, bent over her noodles. “Keep the pressure on!”

As long as Dorothy was leaning forward, he could now and then steal a sideways glance at his daughter. She appeared to be paying attention, her eyes slightly widened and her bowl sitting neglected on the coffee table. Then suddenly she leaped off the sofa and ran upstairs.

“You all right?” he called. “Ivy?”

“It’s making me uncomfortable!” she yelled from the top of the staircase. He could picture her standing there, one foot raised, ready to flee. “Tell me when this part is over, O.K.?”

He wanted to share a commiserating look with Dorothy, but she was still watching the screen, sawing her little pendant back and forth on its chain. “So much for current events,” he said.

•

His daughter had a pretty collection of pens and pencils. A tiny roll of tape, a pink pocket stapler, and a packet of candy-colored paper clips. All these items lived inside a sleek gold pouch with a zipper, and were brought out into the open when she was doing her homework at the kitchen table. Her tapered fingers danced over them in search of the right highlighter. Her fingernails sparkled. Her school supplies sparkled. She had affixed very small puffy stickers in strategic places to her notebooks and binders. Watching her at work, he realized with pride that his daughter would have been one of those girls who intimidated him when he was that age.

•

When he was that age! A slight prickling, like sensation restoring itself to a numb hand. Was his old self considering a return? To his surprise, he had trouble recalling his thoughts and emotions from sixth grade. Surprising, because he remembered the fact of having felt things; it was the point at which his parents took to calling him Heathcliff.

There were a few standouts, to be sure—the memory of being lifted into the air and carried on a gurney, after he’d badly sprained his ankle on the basketball court, and noticing how far away the ceiling of the gym appeared, and the menacing pattern of the rafters—but, in terms of day-to-day twelve-year-old feelings, he had, strangely, lost access. And the access needed to be only temporary: all he wanted was a point of comparison. Was what she was going through normal? In the afternoons he held his breath, never knowing which girl was going to climb into the passenger seat: the happy one, braces flashing, asking if they could make a really quick stop at Baskin-Robbins; or the other one, the one in pain. Had he ever felt that way, too? If only he could remember. All that came to him were the first and last names, in no particular order, of every kid in his homeroom: Steven Burke, Tracy Mayson, Derek Wong, Billy Flanagan, Dawn Littlejohn, Josh Tokofsky, Luke Mandel, Rafi Moncho, Danielle Blood . . . And sometimes along with the names the faces would materialize, like mug shots.

•

New post: a pair of lips, shining wetly.

•

“Try not to internalize,” Dorothy whispered to him, taking his hand as they waited in the dank hallway outside the “Nutcracker” auditions. “Practice wearing a neutral expression.” They stood in silence for a while, trying to hear what was going on behind the closed doors. When their daughter finally exited, looking a little dazed, they gently shepherded her to the car. Did she want lunch? Starbucks? “If it’s O.K., I think I’d just like to go home and watch YouTube,” she said quietly.

•

From the depths of the sofa, a now familiar voice bubbled: “Hi, guys! I’m back, and I’m so excited because today I’m going to be talking about room décor. As you guys know, I love being creative when it comes to doing D.I.Y. décor, but today is extra special because I’m going to be showing you my mini HomeGoods haul! I got so many amazing things, but I think the thing that I love the most is this incredibly fluffy pillow—as you can see, it’s huge, and I’m pretty sure it’s real sheepskin. Yeah, it says here one hundred per cent wool from New Zealand, but don’t worry, no sheep were killed or anything—I don’t think so, right? It’ll just grow back. But the best part is how good it goes with these other decorative pillows I got at HomeGoods—that place is so amazing! Their selection is always changing! I went in thinking I needed picture frames and a dog bed but then I turned down this one aisle and I saw the pillows and I went crazy!”

•

By nightfall his daughter seemed to have revived. She practiced her jazz turns on the slick floor of the kitchen; she winked and dimpled at her reflection in the sliding doors, as if for an audience stretching into the darkened back yard. The dad, rinsing dishes in the sink, had to keep dodging her left foot, which she kicked, without warning, high into the air. She always kicked on that side; it was naturally the more flexible of the two. To the dad, it would have made more sense to practice kicking on the less stretchy side. I am the best, she sang tunelessly, the best, the best, the best. You can’t beat me, no you can’t, so don’t even try, because I am the best. The song sounded as if it had been made up on the spot.

•

Later that week, the physical therapist came into the waiting room while his daughter was still whirring away on the bicycle. For a moment, he thought she was there to grab a magazine, but then she perched on the chair beside him and started speaking. “I’m wondering,” she said, wearing her small, formal smile, “if Ivy has been keeping up with her exercises at home?” His chest began to tingle, the Ivy-vise squeezing. She wasn’t improving. She wasn’t going to get a decent part in “The Nutcracker.” She’d have to spend a second year in the angel corps, shuffling across the stage in the Snowflake scene while holding a battery-operated candle from Home Depot. He felt totally defeated. “I think she has,” he said. “I’ve been telling her to.” Then he admitted, “But I really don’t know.” To his shame, he heard himself adding, somewhat sulkily, “Maybe you should ask her.”

•

Another not-great day at school. His daughter buried her chin and mouth into the folds of her scarf and stared unseeing at the road, not bothering to change the radio station. Election coverage continued unchecked in the background. Beyond the windshield, a vapor trail bisected the blue sky. Closer to the ground, block after block of residential development streamed past. As they merged onto the highway, she asked, “Do you think I cry too much?” He sat with the question for a handful of seconds and then inquired, evenly, “Who told you that?” When she didn’t answer, he asked, a little less evenly, “Who said that bullshit to you?” Also, “When did it become a crime to feel things?” She retreated deeper into her scarf. “Oh, God, Dad. Forget I asked. It doesn’t matter,” and he glanced down at the insulated cup resting in the holder between them. That fucking coffee! He’d been suckered by the promised ease of “Drive-Thru” and ended up arriving ten minutes late for pickup. Only ten minutes, not even a quarter of an hour, but long enough for someone to have said something awful to her. If that indeed was what had happened. Who knew what really went on in the cluster of low-slung buildings that she disappeared into and emerged from every day? He had the urge to carry her far away from them, as far as possible. The value of peer interaction was definitely overstated. He could fill the tank, surprise Dorothy at work, load the trunk with nonperishable groceries and supplies, and then it’d be just the three of them, the open road. Not like free spirits, exactly, more like refugees from the zombie apocalypse, but, still, they’d be together. Plus Bob. He’d almost forgotten the dog.

•

New post: a cupcake, frosted to look like the cute face of a pig.

•

In late October, unexpectedly, a stretch of sunshine. First off, she’d been cast as a dragon dancer in the Chinese Tea scene, and even though only the lower half of her would be visible, she was coming home from the rehearsals in high spirits. Which she attributed to teamwork, telling him, “You see, it is like playing a sport.” And then, in the space of a few days: an Evite to a disco-themed murder-mystery party; an afternoon working with her partner on a social-studies project that turned into a movie night and a sleepover; a plan to go with three girls from her Girl Scout troop to the outlet mall. The dad stood on the front walkway and watched her slide into the back seat of the troop mother’s minivan; as it pulled away from the curb, he waved to the shadowy parent behind the wheel. Their neighbor Marcia happened to be dragging in her trash cans. He waved at her, too. “I can’t believe how big she’s getting!” Marcia called. “Tell me about it,” he said. “Always running off somewhere. I can’t keep up!” He knew he sounded like an ass but he couldn’t help it. He floated up the walkway and in through the front door, and finding Dorothy upstairs, shaking out the bedcovers, he hugged her from behind and made her topple over.

•

On Tuesday, the physical therapist greeted them as usual. “Hi, Ivy,” she said through her little smile, as if he were merely the hulking, nameless attendant who travelled alongside the patient. But today it didn’t bother him, because right away he saw that she had done her duty and voted. He pointed to the oblong sticker on the breast pocket of her gray, grownup-looking blouse, and then pointed to the same sticker attached to his own chest. Earlier, he had debated whether he should wait until after school and take his daughter with him—it’d be something that she could tell her daughter about, had been his thinking—but then he remembered that she had therapy and during his lunch hour went ahead on his own to the polling station, which was in the cavernous basement of an Armenian church. After pointing to their matching stickers, he gave the physical therapist a grin and a thumbs-up. Uncharacteristically, she returned the gesture with open enthusiasm. Oho! Maybe he’d stumbled upon the best way to communicate with her—through hand signals. He swelled suddenly with positive feelings for her. This competent young woman, who was helping his daughter; those nice Armenian congregants who volunteered for long shifts at the polls; the sensible, civic-minded men and women who patiently waited with him, giving up their lunch hours as he had—he felt good about them. He felt good about humanity in general. Basic decency would prevail, and this exhausting, insane election season would soon be over, and by tomorrow he could commit his energies fully to planning the Thanksgiving menu and making sure that his daughter did her Fire Hydrants every night and got better.

•

New post: a black square. Not a photo of a black square but a photo of total blackness. As if the camera had misfired, or the film had been accidentally exposed.

The whole family had a hard time getting up the next morning. The dad felt as if he had been run over by a truck, a big shiny pickup truck that had come swerving out of the darkness and mowed him down, and now had backed up and was waiting for him, its engine revving. His daughter crouched by his pillow and asked, as she often did, “Do I have to go to school today?” Her eyes had turned narrow from crying, then sleeping; her nightshirt had a silvery unicorn on it. They had let her stay up to watch the results with them, and even in the dim light she looked haggard. “No,” he said, placing the pillow over his head. “Go back to sleep.” It was what he intended to do. He had a very small window in which he could slip back into unconsciousness and then wake up in a world where the election hadn’t happened. He tried the trick he’d developed after the first of several basketball injuries, the trick where he would slow his breathing and lie perfectly still, and the throbbing in his ankle would cease, and he could fool himself into believing that he was strong and well before finally relaxing into sleep. He imagined himself in his old bedroom, on his narrow bed, wearing nothing but his Celtics shorts. He repeated to himself, Fit as a fiddle. Fit as a fiddle. But he was agonizingly awake. Dorothy’s body heat beside him was throwing him off. He pushed away the pillow and sighed, and was startled to see his daughter standing in the doorway, fully dressed, with her backpack on. “What are you doing?” he groaned. “Why aren’t you in bed?” She took a nervous step backward. “Daddy,” she said. “I thought you were joking.”

•

Life was a subject on which his daughter collected inspirational quotes. Her favorite—“Life always offers you a second chance. It’s called tomorrow”—served as the bio on her Instagram profile. If asked to describe herself, she invariably said either “fantabulous” or “optimistic.” Among the many items on the third draft of her Christmas list was something called a Happiness Planner, a daily journal designed, she explained, to create positive thinking and personal growth. Christmas was well over a month away, though nearly all the houses on the block already had their lights up.

On a cold morning, the dad sank into the driver’s seat, and in a fog he backed the car down the driveway and into the street before he became aware of a painted wooden sign on top of his dashboard. It was long and thin, with a black background and italicized gold lettering; the paint had been deliberately rubbed away from the sign’s edges to make it look like an heirloom that had once hung in an ancestor’s homestead. Usually this sign hung on the wall above his daughter’s bed, for the most part unnoticed by him, but now, looking at it closely, he saw that its syntax was slightly garbled. It read, “Life is always offered a second chance. It’s called tomorrow.” Not as bad as what he’d seen in some instruction manuals, but still off, and annoyingly so, considering that the words were the whole point. He flipped over the sign to confirm his suspicions about where it had been manufactured. “Proudly made in Michigan, USA,” the sticker said. He didn’t know why he bothered feeling surprise anymore. He tossed the sign into the back seat, face down. It struck him as darkly symbolic, as so many things did these days. Impersonal “life” marching on, taking for itself all the tomorrows “you” had squandered. And don’t get him started on Michigan. How did the unintelligible thing even end up on his dashboard? He’d have to remind Ivy to take it up to her room, or else it would remain in the back of his car for months.

•

“Do you realize how Snapchat works?” Dorothy asked him, her face lit up in the dark by her laptop. “That it just disappears? The photos they send each other? And that they can write captions on them? Then it all goes poof—like in five seconds it’s gone. So there’s no way of knowing what they’re receiving, or putting out there, what images and messages they’re being exposed to, there’s no way to monitor any of it, because it vanishes . . . ” She clicked on her trackpad. “Hey. Do you know about this?” He rolled toward her and grunted. “Uh-huh.” With his mouthguard in, it wasn’t easy to enunciate. She reached over to the nightstand and then dropped the neoprene eye mask onto his face, saying, “I think I’m going to be up for a little while.” He heaved himself back onto his more comfortable side, the side with the good shoulder, and pulled the mask down over his eyes. Everything disappeared. There was something about being suddenly swaddled in darkness that made each of her clicks seem slightly louder than the one before, as if the source of the sound were coming, very slowly, closer.

•

The next morning, Dorothy returned from her run bearing a stack of newspapers in her arms, somewhat tentatively, like she was carrying someone else’s baby. She dropped it heavily onto the island. “Since when do we subscribe to the Guardian?” she asked. “And the New York Times?” The dad looked up from his phone in confusion. He did recall making a few late-night donations to the N.R.D.C. and the Southern Poverty Law Center, but he’d forgotten all about the newspapers. “You know there’s this thing called a digital subscription,” she remarked as she opened the refrigerator. He moved out of her way. “That’s what I did with the Washington Post,” he said, remembering now. “Because they don’t deliver outside the D.C. area.”

“In a week this place is going to look like a hoarder’s house,” Dorothy predicted. “Piles of newspaper everywhere.”

“I just think it’s important to model,” the dad said, looking meaningfully in the direction of the sofa. “Model where we get our information from.”

He half expected his daughter’s head to pop up like a groundhog’s at the mention of “model.” Kendall Jenner? Gigi Hadid? “No, not that kind of model,” he heard himself saying wearily over a laugh track.

Dorothy handed him a glass of juice. “Stop looking so pious,” she said. “I agree with you.”

•

New post: a hand holding a clear plastic Starbucks cup filled with a liquid the color of Pepto-Bismol. In it floated small chunks of something red.

•

“Do you think this is full of caffeine?” Dorothy asked, her screen tilted in his direction. Though they’d made a reservation, their table wasn’t ready. They stood wedged into the little area by the door where umbrellas would have gone if it had been raining. “Who knows what they actually put in their drinks.”

The door opened, the air was cold, and they squeezed closer together to let the new arrivals through.

“Well, she gets points for consistency, I’ll give her that,” Dorothy murmured as she continued thumbing her phone. “She’s really thinking about her palette.”

“Her pallet?” That was how he heard it, pallet, like where Joan of Arc would have slept.

“On her Instagram. It’s pink. Her palette is a mix of light pink and hot pink.”

He still didn’t understand what she was talking about.

“With the occasional salmon accent thrown in.”

He blinked angrily. Dorothy had downloaded the app only a week ago.

“What about the picture of Michelle Obama?” he asked. “She’s not pink.”

“Her dress is.” His wife smiled at him.

At this point the hostess looked up from her station and signalled for them to approach. The noise of the restaurant rose up around them, and for a moment he felt enfolded by the warm lighting and the voices and the smell of food being thoughtfully prepared. But none of it gave him any pleasure.

As soon as they were seated, he ordered wine for them both and in a little bout of resentment told Dorothy that a pink palette struck him as depressingly clichéd. Ivy was just imitating what she saw other girls doing online. Carefully styled shots of doughnuts and videos of dissolving bath bombs. Groupthink, he said. She kept talking about her personal “style” and her “vibe” and her “aesthetic,” but nothing about it was actually hers. The photo of her hand holding the pink drink from Starbucks? He’d seen practically the same image posted a hundred times before.

His wife reached out and touched the arm of a passing server. “Can we get a new fork, please?” Accidentally he had knocked his off the table.

•

“I know you don’t like it when I talk about YouTubers, but can I tell you just this one thing? What makes Ashleigh Janine different from a lot of other YouTubers is that she’s really honest with her fans. She’ll come right out and say who’s sponsoring her. She doesn’t try to hide it or make it seem like it’s just a coincidence that she uses Simple and Clinique. She’ll say, ‘I’m so excited to be working with these brands.’ And also? She’s grateful. She says all the time how blessed she is. Because she knows it’s not usual for a twenty-three-year-old to be buying her first house. And have it be so big.”

“She has a lot of other sponsors, not just Simple. Plus she’s writing a Y.A. novel, so she gets money from that, too.”

He didn’t know how to continue the conversation. Accelerating, he made it through a yellow light.

“Dad?” his daughter said, after a minute or two. “When Ashleigh’s book comes out, can I get it?”

He must have looked ill-disposed—or maybe he just looked ill—because then she said jovially, “Come on! It’s reading.”

But could it really be called reading? Did it actually count as a book? Or was it just something AMAZING. Something to be SO EXCITED about. To be SO GRATEFUL for. I hope you guys enjoyed it! I had so much fun doing it, and, if you want me to do more things like this, make sure to give it a big thumbs-up and comment down below. And don’t forget to subscribe to my vlog channel—which just got, I can’t believe it, two million subscribers!—because there you can see all the behind-the-scenes! So, yeah, thank you for watching and I love you guys so so so much—

In fact, would it be going too far to call it TREMENDOUS? Something INCREDIBLE. A massive story. And very complex. Made by some really incredible people. Of such incredible talent. It will be a big win, there’s no question about it. And I can tell you why, because, number one, the enthusiasm. The enthusiasm for this, it is really tremendous—

Right before the impact, he heard his daughter gasp.

And, in the silence afterward, he felt her chest rising and falling rapidly against his outstretched arm.

•

New post: a bared collarbone with a seat-belt burn running diagonally across it. The welt shiny with ointment, and pink.

•

During the intermission of “The Nutcracker,” he was startled to see the physical therapist standing in line for the ladies’ room. She was holding a potted orchid from Trader Joe’s and wearing a velvet blazer. “You came!” he said, a little too loudly. He glanced around to see if maybe she had brought a date. She asked him, “Is this Ivy’s mom?,” and he remembered to introduce Dorothy, who promptly apologized for the length and over-all tedium of the production. “But I’m enjoying it,” the therapist protested. She complimented the girl who danced Arabian Coffee and also the Chinese dragon dancers, who had succeeded, the dad admitted, in bringing a sort of unruly street energy to the show. “Ivy was wonderful,” she said, and together he and Dorothy smiled. “Like you could really tell,” he said.

She looked at him seriously. “I would know those legs anywhere. Over-pronation of the feet, well-developed gastrocnemius. She was third from the back.” The confidence with which she said it moved him unexpectedly. He wished he could say he knew anything that well. He thought of all the time she had spent working with his daughter deep in the forest of equipment: two times a week, for nearly three months. Not only a licensed professional but an expert in her field. And here she was, on her day off—

It was the therapist who was smiling now. “Don’t look like that, Dave,” she said. “It’s not magic or anything. It’s just my job.” He began smiling, too, to show that he of course understood, but judging from the expression on her face, and on Dorothy’s, it was very possible that his eyes were also leaking a little. The likelihood made him smile even more; that and the fact that—well, what do you know?—she did remember his name, after all.

•

A week after the performance, he came home late from work, and when he pulled the rental car into the driveway he saw his daughter sitting at the dining-room table. She was framed photogenically by the room’s picture window. For a moment, he felt the vise in his chest tightening—Why was she alone on a Friday night? Why hadn’t Dorothy set up a sleepover for her? Why hadn’t anyone invited her to their house?—but as he climbed out of the car he saw that she appeared unperturbed and in fact rather happy, or at least happily occupied. She had her earbuds in and was making Christmas cards, the supplies spread in a glittering swath across the table.

When she spotted him outside, she immediately yanked out her earbuds, pushed back her chair, and hurled herself against the picture window, landing with a soft thud. Her cheek lay smushed against the glass, her arms were splayed, and while she still needed one leg to stand on, she’d lifted the other and pressed its bent shape to the window. What in the world. He had no idea what she was expressing, or rehearsing—but the gesture was undoubtedly directed at him. Out in the darkness he gave her a thumbs-up, but her eyes were limply shut. Not a muscle moved. It was all very realistic.

Was he witnessing the magic of dance? Of—what was it called when she was little?—creative movement? Somehow she had managed to convey through her body precisely what he’d been feeling since November: not crushed, not flattened, but flung, as if from an obliterating blast, against a hard, exposing surface. Spread, embarrassed, suspended, without the strength to open his eyes and survey the damage. He put down his computer bag and drew closer to the window. He tapped lightly on the pane but she didn’t flinch. Pressing his palm to hers, he wondered if she could feel his outline through the glass. He tried it with his other palm, and then his cheek. He raised and crooked his knee to match the angle of her leg. In sixth-grade theatre class he’d had to do mirror games, but actually this was easier, because now he got to choose his partner. What was hard was balancing on one foot. When he started to wobble, her silent laughter made the whole window shake. ♦

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum has published two works of fiction: “Madeleine Is Sleeping” and “Ms. Hempel Chronicles.”